dieting – Philoquialisms

Weekly status update [0069/????]

Insert metatextual reference about inserting a Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure reference here here.

Having finished off all of the core content in Borderlands last week, I set about getting the Platinum trophy, because I hate myself. Of course it has That One Trophy; in this case it’s actually not a hard one to get–you simply have to reach level 50–so much as it a tedious one. I had to play through about two-thirds of the game all over again on the second, more-challenging playthrough to get up to that level. Ugh. I was honestly quite surprised, looking at trophy counts, that it was far from the most rare trophy; I guess people like grinding through the same game multiple times? Anyway: done and dusted and trophies are still the worst.
No more Borderlands most nights means my time has been spent elsewhere. I’ve been doing my best to transfer it to books, because I’m in danger of having another “bring a bunch of unread titles back to the library because I can’t catch up” moment, but the awful McDevitt books were slowing me down there for a while. Thankfully I powered through them and am now most of the way through Elizabeth Bear’s Range of Ghosts, a fantasy novel I bounced hard off once before but decided to give another shot. And I’m glad I did, because it’s actually quite excellent. I’ll be finishing that up today and moving on to the second and third books in the trilogy post-haste. The book I read in between, Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan, was also quite good.
The ugh-factor of Starhawk and The Last Sunset prompted me to write a piece about long-running series earlier this week, which in retrospect comes off mostly as an “old man yells at cloud” bit. Not that I disagree with anything I said there, but, y’know, still.
Quite a bit of dominion.games scattered throughout the week, along with Real Actual In-Person Gaming on Sunday night, thanks to Chris and Jenna inviting me over for dinner and tabletopping. (Shut up, Chrome spell-checker, that’s totally a word.) I’ve had BattleCON: War of Indines on my brain for weeks now; I honestly think it’s my favorite 2p game of all time, and wanted to show it off. Jenna seemed to enjoy it, even though it is quite overwhelming the first few times you play. We also really enjoyed a couple of games of Roll to the Top, a super-easy roll-and-write game with just enough strategic oomph to be worth playing. A game of Hanabi didn’t go great, Race for the Galaxy was interesting and challenging as always, and there was an absolutely bonkers game of Dominion where I almost cracked 100VP in a non-artificial setting and without Colonies and Platinum. Woof. Great game night all around: excellent food, company, and experiences.
I finished watching Origin on YouTube Premium, which was solid but not amazing, and started rewatching Deadwood in anticipation of the movie this evening. I’m nowhere near done with that rewatch, but I’m also not in the biggest hurry either. My original watch was very binge-y, and sipping at it slowly over the next couple of weeks will–I hope–make the movie that much sweeter to watch.
After being a GoodBoye on my diet for several weeks I fell off the wagon hard for a couple of days… but have managed to right myself and am back on track (and actually better off than before) already. I’m still not down to where I was immediately before those gall bladder attacks, but I should be getting there soonish. I hope.

It’s ugly wind and rain here today, which seems like a perfect excuse to curl back up with a book. And so I shall!

Weekly status update [0066/????]

A surprisingly game-y week, even for me.

I ended up at Fercott on both Tuesday and Wednesday evening for boardgames, which was quite nice. Tuesday we played New Frontiers, which is the “traditional board game” version of Race for the Galaxy, one of my favorite games of all time. It was fine, but felt… unnecessary? That could be my huge bias in favor of Race speaking, though. Or the fact that I lost. We also played some Hokm; it was nice to get some traditional card gaming in. Wednesday had us playing a couple of Lost Cities/Keltis-family games, plus Grifters Nexus (which seems more interesting than the original) and proper Race. That last game was a tie broken by cards in hand, a very rare outcome. I got to hear someone say that they finally felt they actually understood the game as well, which is definitely one of the biggest hurdles it has.
Besides the real-world tabletop gaming, I’ve also continued to make fairly heavy use of dominion.games. If I were still gainfully employed I’d buy a subscription, but as-is I’m actually pretty okay with my base set + Renaissance set-up (thanks, rulebook!), to be perfectly honest.
After finally finishing A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (which I wrote about earlier this week), I’ve moved onto State Tectonics by Malka Older. I’m enjoying it quite a bit, but I keep putting it down to do other stuff. It’s a fast read, it’s just not quite… engaging enough to make me sit in my chair and tear through it. I’ll be done soon anyway, though, given how zippy it is.
I finally decided to start watching season 2 of Westworld, mainly because of how terrible the most recent episode of A Game of Thrones was. It’s been enjoyable, more coherent than the first season, and still gorgeous as all get-out. I’m about halfway through and curious to see where it’s going to end up with several of the plot threads, along with wondering just what a third season of the show will look like.
On the videogame side, I went from playing Monster Hunter World heavily to becoming disenchanted with the game pretty abruptly. It started to feel way more mechanical than genuinely interesting, and I’ve put it aside for the time being. That still leaves Borderlands and Portal Knights, both of which are also pretty repetitive in their structure, but for whatever reason they don’t bother me as much.
I’m back on keto for the most part. I treated myself to the amazing “molcajete” at the local Tex-Mex place last night, a skillet full of delicious sizzling meat, onions, and even cactus. I ate every bite. Plus some tortillas, I’m afraid, hence the “for the most part.”

If this next episode of A Game of Thrones is as bad as episode four was, I may have to break out my emergency TV rations and finally start watching Fargo season 2 or The Deuce. Here’s hoping I don’t.

Weekly status update [0065/????]

In some ways, this week felt like more of a recovery period than last week, which makes no sense, but there you have it.

Speaking of which, I’m basically completely recovered from the surgery, other than my sweet sweet new scars. (I’m only being slightly facetious; the scar in my belly button is actually kinda cool, and the others are small enough that, once they’re no longer raised due to being so recent, they’ll be pretty much unnoticeable.) I’ve been taking a lot of naps and otherwise feeling pretty lethargic, which could partly be due to the surgery… or just because I’ve been eating like crap.
Also speaking of which, I’ve been eating like crap. I went back on keto for a couple of days and then pretty much immediately jumped back off of it. I’m giving myself until this Sunday to once again enjoy the delights of fatty starchy foods before trying to climb back on the wagon.
Most of my spare time has been playing videogames, and for that matter co-op stuff with friends. I played a bit of Monster Hunter World over a year ago, but the group I’ve been playing EDF with has pivoted to it and we’ve been playing it a ton. So much so that I didn’t go to bed until after 5am this morning, putting in something like ten hours last night. I also played Portal Knights for the first time on Thursday with my other co-op group, which was a fine, inoffensive take on “Minecraft with classes and levels.” And there’s still Borderlands several nights a week. It’s been really nice, actually, playing games as a socialization thing on top of the joy of just, y’know, playing.
There was a bit of Dominion Online this week as well, although not nearly as much as last week. That was the only boardgaming I managed to fit in.
Along with poking at several Everett Kaser logic puzzle games off and on throughout the week, I continued chipping away at Picross 3D Round 2. One day…
…and I finally made some headway in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. My plan is to read a bunch more of it today, after posting this, in hopes that I can mostly get through it and move onto the more interesting science fiction that’s hiding underneath it in my stack. If I find myself still stymied by the end of the day, I may move on anyhow, which feels a bit like defeat but more like acceptance that I’m just not that into the book.
My car threw a Check Engine light up last weekend. That obviously scared me, but a quick visit to Auto Zone and its OBD reader informed me that there’s something up with the gas cap. I bought a replacement; no dice. Apparently the gas cap sensor is broken. Eh. As issues go, I can live with it.
My new friend LisaLiisa just hit affiliate on Twitch. She was my one non-personal-friend subscriber, and she plays more regularly (and more interesting stuff) than I ever did. Check her out.

Weekly status update [0059/????]

Let’s just get to it, shall we?

Had my appointment Wednesday morning with the surgeon that will likely be removing my gall bladder. The consultation was short but informative, and I have an ultrasound scheduled for next Thursday to verify that I have gallstones, after which the actual surgery can occur. I’m bummed that it’s taking that long, because this is already messing with my plans to travel back home in April, but “getting healthy” is obviously more important than “fun retirement travelling.” Still: sigh.
Still reading Guns, Germs, and Steel. It’s excellent, but like most non-prose non-fiction I’m finding it a slow read. I plan on concentrating on it more this weekend, though, in the hopes of knocking it out.
I finished up all of the puzzles in Penpa 2019 that I plan on doing (there’s a type, Number Link, that I just don’t like at all). My total time for the puzzle book was over 3000 minutes, or fifty hours. Not bad for a $14 investment. The longest individual puzzle was a Ripple Effect that took me nearly two hours and still had some errors in it, with a Heyawake–probably my weakest of Nikoli’s commonly published types, not counting Number Link–coming in a close second. I also did a smattering of other random puzzles from various books and magazines, but I’m taking a bit of a break after the brain-squeezing pain that those last puzzles in Penpa 2019 gave me.
An extended game night on Tuesday led to me playing El Grande for the first time ever, which I wrote about here.
We beat Earth Defense Force 4.1, and have moved on to Earth Defense Force 5, which is excellent so far, and different enough that it doesn’t feel like “more of the same” immediately after its predecessor. That said, I’m planning on taking it a bit slower than EDF4.1, which I came close to burning out on several times over the last few weeks.
I still watch Twitch on the regs (and I stream most evenings as well). I’ve been staying away from Landail’s channel for a variety of reasons, but I had to come back this past week, as he was playing Mario Golf for the Gameboy Color. It’s a game I convinced him to add to his list of RPGs, and I felt an obligation to watch him play it. The number of people who wandered into his channel and were baffled that he was playing a golf game was… impressively high. He beat it just an hour or so ago, as of the time of this writing, and seemed to really enjoy it despite the fact that he had never really played a golf videogame before. Mission accomplished, as they say. Now I kinda want to play through it myself…
“Classic recipe” Honeycomb: still nowhere near as good as when I was a kid. Cookie Crisp: mediocre. Chocolate Marshmallow Mateys: probably the best cereal I’ve ever had? Being off of the keto diet due to my gall bladder isn’t all downside.

I’m unsurprisingly apprehensive about Thursday, even though an ultrasound is no big deal, because of what it is likely to result in. That said, I want all of this to be over, one way or the other. I’ll post an update here on Thursday (or whenever I hear the news), one way or the other.

Weekly status update [0058/????]

It’s been a bit of a rough week, if I’m being honest, albeit (mostly) a quiet one.

The roughness: I woke up early Tuesday morning in pretty serious pain radiating throughout the lower right side of my body. This had actually happened the week before, and again a bit over a month ago. Three times is “something serious is going on” land, and I called my mother to commiserate; she agreed with the assessment I had already come to, which was that it was likely I was having an issue with my gall bladder. I scheduled an appointment at a local clinic, and the PA who saw me there immediately agreed. I’m scheduled to see a surgeon next Wednesday, who will probably do some sort of CT scan to determine next steps, and in the meantime I’ve switched from the high-fat low-carb keto diet to a low-fat high-carb one. No attacks since, which is good, but I’m expecting to have to have surgery, which is… y’know… not so good.
Other things have been more mundane, thankfully. I finished up Watch Dogs, as mentioned earlier this week, and although I started on its sequel I couldn’t actually play more than a bit of it before having to put it down; it’s definitely a better game, but it’s still too similar to the first one for me to jump immediately into its world. We also played a bit of EDF4.1 and some Overcooked! 2.
I read a lot. The Lynburn Legacy books are done and dusted; they were perfectly readable, but not all that special or memorable, I’m afraid. Monstrous Affections, an anthology of “relationships with monsters” book that I checked out just because it had the original short story that spawned In Other Lands, turned out to be excellent from beginning to end, with a bunch of great little stories. Some of them I would love to see expanded into full-length novels, which is always a good sign for a short. I also read Connie Willis’ Crosstalk cover-to-cover today, which was good but not great, and definitely had some creepy behavior/Idiot Ball plot issues that I would have thought Willis would be past at this point in her career.
I also continued banging on Penpa 2019; I’m down to only five puzzle types left in the book, and that’ll soon drop to two, although the difficulty of those five types definitely continues to escalate as I reach their hardest sections.
Up until the issues Tuesday morning, I was actually super-proud of myself diet-wise, having knocked off quite a bit more weight thanks to very careful eating. Sadly that’s out of the window for the moment… but I’d be lying if I said I’m not happy to be eating cereal and milk for most of my meals now. (Chocolate Marshmallow Mateys are still amazing; the “back to the old recipe” Honeycomb still taste nowhere near as good as the version of my youth. Get Honey Buzzers instead.)

I’m obviously more than a little apprehensive about this coming Wednesday and what I’m likely to learn, but them’s the breaks when you have a body that steadily refuses to age any slower than one year per year. Sigh. Until then, I’ll mostly be curling up with books–I finally started Guns, Germs, and Steel about twenty minutes before sitting down to write this–and enjoying my cereal.

Weekly status update [0057/????]

What is it about “Reelin’ in the Years” that makes it get stuck in my head all the damn time?

I wrote a thing that I’m pretty proud of earlier this week. I’d appreciate any thoughts you had upon reading it; it’s pretty intensely personal, and (as one person pointed out) it has a few too many adverbs, but life-as-prose is surprisingly difficult to write and right now I’m not sure it’s worth the effort.
I gave blood for the first time since retiring on Tuesday. (The first scheduled drive after I signed up was at the beginning of January, when I was still back home visiting family.) It took too long, but I suppose burning an hour-plus every two months is small potatoes if it helps someone, and I definitely felt better after doing it.
I started on the second Lynburn Legacy book by Sarah Rees Brennan. They continue to be fine but not great, not nearly as gripping as In Other Lands, but they’re not terribly long either so I’ll finish all three of them for sure.
I finally finished the Platform Studies book on the SNES: Super Power, Spoony Bards, and Silverware. It was very heavy on the non-technical “culture and processes around the platform” side, which tend to be my least favorite PS books, but it was probably the best of that ilk so far. After the utter brilliance of I am Error, though, I can’t help but see it as something of a disappointment. With it, I’m fully caught up on the series, and have started reading The Friendly Orange Glow, which is all about the PLATO system. I’m only about twenty pages in and am already pretty fascinated by the book; I wasn’t expecting it to start with B.F. Skinner, that’s for sure.
Most of my game time has been with Watch Dogs, which continues to be aggressively mediocre to bad. I have That Thing where I have to play games in order, though, so I’m toughing it out so I can get to the (supposedly) much better Watch Dogs 2. Ugh.
I finally, finally made it under 270 pounds at my weigh-in this morning; this has taken entirely too long, and I still have quite a ways to go, but it felt like some sort of major accomplishment, so: yay!

If the weather stops being so miserable this week, I need to take my car in for an inspection. That just about sums up how much adulting I’m willing to manage these next seven days. I am, indeed, stowin’ away the time, it appears.

Weekly status update [0056/????]

The weather’s been pretty nasty here this week. So I guess it’s a good thing I almost never leave the house?

My heating system completely failed sometime Sunday night. It took until Wednesday for it to get fixed; it was just a blown fuse. Fortunately my landlord loaned me some space heaters in the interim.
Played lots of videogames. Along with finishing Horizon: Zero Dawn, I’ve also made my way through Batman: The Telltale Series, which was quite good, and started on their Game of Thrones title. Plus there’s the most-nights EDF4.1 pew pews, and Overcooked! 2 on Thursday.
So far so consistent with Tabletop Simulator on Thursdays as well; we played Aeon’s End again this week. And Friday night was a “shorter games” game night at a friend and old coworker’s house; we played a bunch of different things. The highlight was an extremely tense game of Tempel des Schreckens where I had to do some of the most creative, wheeler-dealer lying I’ve ever had to do in a social deduction game. I also bounced hard off of Deja Vu, bailing on the game after a single round.
I’ve been slowly reading Sarah Rees Brennan’s first “Lynburn Legacy” book, Unspoken. It’s… fine, but definitely not the lightning in a bottle that In Other Lands managed to capture. I also read Auggie & Me, a collection of three short stories that paint in some gaps in the narrative of Wonder. Inessential but quite readable.
The third season of The Expanse was excellent through and through, and I am delighted to see that it’s been picked up by Amazon Prime for at least one more season. The only other thing I’ve been watching is keeping up with Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which feels just as good after the network switch as it did before.
I actually did some puzzles for the first time in a while. I’m almost done with Penpa Mix 2019, having done all of several types of puzzles in the book. I suspect when it’s all said and done the slim volume will have taken me somewhere around 30 hours to complete (but I plan on doing the math to see one way or the other).
You know that annoying thing where you know you’re eating properly for, like, a week plus, but the scale refuses to budge even though there’s mathematically no way you shouldn’t weigh less given caloric intake? Yeah. That’s been this week for me. Fortunately I resisted the siren call of “screw this, buy some Biscoff cookie butter at Walmart” that rang in my head most days when I saw the numbers. We’ll see how much longer I can resist.

I’m going to try and finish that first Lynburn book today, even though I find myself putting it down for just about any reason I can devise. Then I think I’ll finally read Guns, Germs, and Steel, a book that has been “things Phil is interested in”-adjacent for too many years to still leave unread.

Weekly status update [0053/????]

To misquote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “It’s just some week, you know?” With one major exception, which I’ll put at the end even though it happened early in the week, because I like drama.

Most of which I spent playing video games. Most evenings involved the B-movie joys of Earth Defense Force 4.1. Late Thursday night I played Overcooked! 2 with a pair of friends who were couch co-op-ing it in Portland and a third friend back in Louisiana, and it works… amazingly well. So few games support a mix of same-room and different-room players, but Overcooked! 2 makes it seem easy. I’ll likely have more to say about the game later, but: it’s great, assuming you have at least one other person to play with. Lastly, I apparently got over the samey-ness of Assassin’s Creed very quickly, because I reinstalled The Ezio Trilogy and spent, like, sixteen hours yesterday playing Revelations. (That’s why this isn’t going up until Saturday; I was up until 6am playing.) It’s… fine? The controls still suck, but Istanbul makes for a fascinating setting.
Somewhere between board games and videogames lies Tabletop Simulator. We had the first of what will hopefully be many scheduled game nights with it on Thursday; only one other person showed up, but that’s fine, because there are plenty of excellent two-player games. (If you’re likely to be available at 6:30pm Eastern on Thursdays, hit me up and I’ll send you the appropriate Discord link.) TTS continues to be an utter mess to control, but the ability to play board games every week again makes me put up with its jank.
I’ve also been watching a bit of TV; specifically, Russian Doll on Netflix, via a recommendation from an old coworker. It is very good, at least to the halfway point. I should have finished it by now, but see above as to why I haven’t.
I picked up a book with a tiny bit more regularity this week than in several months prior. I’m about halfway through Christopher Priest’s The Prestige, which was made into one of my favorite movies of all time (and possibly my favorite Christopher Nolan movie). It’s a very different beast from said film, but quite good so far, even if not very far in I think I would have figured out one of the big twists in both works. (Of course, I know it from the film, so it’s a bit cheaty to say that.)
I’ve done puzzles again too. I’ve been working through a Japanese variety book from my favorite puzzle company, Nikoli, doing one of each type of puzzle before looping back to the start of the book. I’ve done 17 of each now, and the difficulty progression is real. When I started, the dozen puzzle types took me a total of around thirty to forty-five minutes to finish, or three to four minutes a puzzle. The last loop was over three hours, breaking fifteen minutes a puzzle, although really it’s one or two types that take me 30+ minutes along with some that are still pretty quick to solve. This is my regular reminder that puzzles are crazy cheap entertainment; I’ve put something like 20-30 hours into the book, paid ~$14 for it, and still have another 10+ hours to go.
The diet’s been very swingy recently, and I decided that–at least for the moment–the positive-feedback parts of having a scale outweigh the negatives of becoming a numbers-driven beast. So I bought one, and promptly got back on the wagon, and apparently lost 10 pounds in four days. A lot of that is excess water-and-waste weight, but still, it was the shot in the arm I needed to get back on the stick more consistently. And I have no compunction about putting the scale in the closet if it starts being a bad influence.
The major exception to the not-much-new: I did my taxes last Saturday, and was pleased to see I’d be getting money back from the federal government for the first time in years. And then… I got another W-2 on Monday, for a deferred compensation plan that apparently is tracked in a completely different way than I expected. Oops. Now I have to file amended tax returns for both the state and the IRS. I was in a flop-sweat panic for a while on Monday, until I did the numbers… and realized that it means the US Government owes me another thousand dollars because of the second W-2. With them owing me money rather than the other way around, I’m a lot less worried. I’m gonna wait until March to file the amended returns, just in case something else comes in… and I’ve learned my lesson about doing my taxes early, I guess. Bleh.

I’ve said before that I’m pretty change- and surprise-averse, and this week epitomizes that sort of thing: a lot of “much the same” along with one “oh sweet merciful deity what I have I done?” moment that makes the whole thing stick in the mind. At least for now. I’d say that a little variety is a good thing… but I’d definitely have preferred this been a dull week from start to finish.

Weekly status update [0052/????]

Fifty-two weeks. Not gonna lie: I’m more than a little surprised at myself that I’ve managed to stick to writing this for one day short of a year. I’ve always had a bit of a problem with sticking to long term projects, but somehow this one’s survived so far. I’ve toyed with shutting this down in the next week or so, given that the low readership makes it feel a little too self-aggrandizing to write this stuff… but I think I’m going to continue for the time being.

Anyway, I’m writing this one a bit earlier than usual because I want to write up a full-year retrospective this weekend. Fortunately, it’s been a quiet week, so there’s not a ton to say.

I’m most of the way through the third season of The Man in the High Castle. The first two were passable but not great, and I mostly watched thanks to my love of alternate history; this third season, though, has been jam-packed with Big Stuff Happening, and I’m genuinely excited to see where it’s going.
I finished up Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood on the PS4, netting a Platinum trophy I was forever denied back on the PS3 due to stupid online requirements. It had a whole bunch of terrible design bits that continued to prove my previous take on achievements is correct. I booted up the third Ezio game, Revelations, and after about fifteen minutes went “nope” and deleted it off of my PS4. I’ll probably come back to it in six months or a year or so, but right now I’m super burnt out on that particular flavor of game.
A dreadful discovery: Walmart now carries cookie butter, both store-brand and Biscoff. This is really unfortunate for my future diet.
Totally unrelated (I hope), I spent most of Wednesday with a combination of a bad stomach-ache and back trouble, which meant I spent basically the entire day in and out of the bed, failing to get any quality sleep. I finally managed to wake up with some verve… a few minutes past midnight. Ugh. Sometimes the wacky sleep schedule I have thanks to being retired is nice, and sometimes it’s kinda awful. This was definitely one of the latter times.
I have several books checked out of the library and have been busy ignoring them, instead reading Chokes McGee’s Let’s Plays of Final Fantasy Legend and its sequel. It’s the sort of things that probably mean nothing if you didn’t play games in the late ’80s or early ’90s, but the LPs were impressively well-written, funny and poignant throughout. I have no regrets having spent hours on them.

Fifty-two weeks. Crazy, man. Crazy.

Weekly status update [0051/????]

The author stares silently at a calendar, a dazed look on his face.

Much of this week was spent watching HBomberguy’s Donkey Kong 64 charity stream for Mermaids. I read about it after-the-fact and am slowly catching up on it… but the stream’s close to 60 hours long, so even watching it at 1.25x (for the gameplay parts) and 1.5x (for the “just chatting parts”) is a whole lot of time. It’s been really good so far, though, and a pleasant change from the usual negativity and vitriol on the Internet.
Speaking of videogames, I’ve actually been playing them again quite a bit this week. I finally finished up Shining in the Darkness this weekend, played a bit of this and that earlier in the week, then settled in on trying to finish the PS4 remaster of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood (or, as I like to call it, Assassin’s Creed 2.1). I made some serious progress in it, but am putting the game away for a day or two thanks to playing so much my right thumb hurts. I even played some online co-op Overcooked! 2, which was just as fantastic as I thought it would be.
We had a game night on Tuesday at Fercott Fermentables. It was just three of us, but we had a great time playing Aeon’s End, a quirky co-operative deckbuilding game. I liked it quite a bit more than I thought I would going in, and I actually had pretty high expectations. I also managed to play a pair of games of ConHex on Tabletop Simulator with a friend… which mainly just made me long to play more stuff on TTS more frequently.
I haven’t talked much about my diet since I’ve returned from Louisiana, but never fear: I’ve actually been sticking with it after the first few days of “travel is stressful and I don’t need this too” justification. (I mean, travel is stressful, but it’s still a justification for bad behavior.) I suspect I’ve taken off all of the weight I put on during my near-month back home, and maybe a little extra? I continue to not weigh myself due to the way that tends to mess me up, but pants sure seem to be looser…
…and speaking of food, I had dinner last night with one of my good friends and old coworkers. His last day at the company was this Thursday; he’s moving into the world of small business, helping his wife run a local veterinary clinic. I am extremely interested to see the similarities and differences with our experiences, although obviously there are a tremendous number of fundamentals that are already quite different for the two of us (family vs. single, working vs. not) so I don’t think they’ll actually be all that comparable. I wish him the best of luck, and we plan on having dinner on the regs to catch up, compare, and enjoy tasty Tex-Mex.

You walk away slowly. He doesn’t seem to notice, his eyes still fixated on the flimsy cardboard-and-paper construction. “Hang in there!” it blandishes. Hang in there indeed.